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Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

reuters.com

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Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#261

Post by atomical »

donmatito wrote: post #210
asynchrony wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is generally my main source of skepticism relating to blockchain solutions. The ledger is 100% trustable as long as it describes digital assets that are entirely confined within the distributed ledger, but a digital token doesn't stop men with guns from taking your house. Just like a digital signature provides no guarantees that the associated information is true.

No but it certifies who has entered the info, right? That might be part of the solution here

Is that part of the problem?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#262

Post by alexbeloi »

piracykills wrote: post #160
icebraining wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already open file storage protocols, and open source clients that supports many storage providers. I use git-annex, which supports about a dozen commercial services, plus any machine that supports SFTP, SMB, Webdav or rsync, among others. And of course, it encrypts everything locally before uploading. What's the point of the blockchain?

Sure, you can sync to your own drives or to several commercial storage providers, but it's not as cheap as it should be. We're talking geographically distributed storage on an open marketplace, cryptographically enforced for extremely cheap prices. Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services which could even attempt to compete on price with something like Sia today (Filecoin and others in the future po…

>Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services which could even attempt to compete on price with something like Sia today (Filecoin and others in the future potentially)

It would be nice to see Sia/Filecoin provide some basic DB metrics like availability, durability, latency, bandwidth... things that any prospective client would absolutely need to know.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#263

Post by spookthesunset »

hapnin wrote: post #205
phpnode wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really not hard to think of useful applications for blockchain. Then please list some useful, concrete applications of blockchain that would not be solved better and cheaper by a normal database.

The first sentence of the Bitcoin white paper describes a problem that can't be solved by a normal DB. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

> "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

Except it failed completely at that. The blockchain has proven through real world use that it is unusable as a currency. By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#264

Post by darawk »

spookthesunset wrote: post #253
darawk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because at a fundamental level, distributed adversarial consensus commoditizes trust . Institutional trust is an enormous bottleneck in our economy. It is a virtuous cycle that ossifies industries, e.g. banking, and consumer finance. Why does it still take longer to send money to someone in another country than it does to mail them a package? Why are credit cards a pull architecture, even though that is pretty obviou…

> distributed adversarial consensus commoditizes trust.... It absolutely does no such thing. Trust has nothing to do with technology and you'll never escape the need to trust real world, meatspace based institutions and humans. At the end of the day you are arguing "code is law", which is a pile of fresh horse manure, clear to anybody who saw what happened to The DAO. Technology is created and governed by humans and…

> It absolutely does no such thing. Trust has nothing to do with technology and you'll never escape the need to trust real world, meatspace based institutions and humans. At the end of the day you are arguing "code is law", which is a pile of fresh horse manure, clear to anybody who saw what happened to The DAO.

Anecdotes are not arguments. You keep making statements, but providing no justification for them. You could say all of the things you just said about the internet in the mid 90s. And people did. And then in 2001, those people felt vindicated. But today, they look like the fools that they were.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#265

Post by asynchrony »

donmatito wrote: post #243
s73v3r_ wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you know that's the actual person, or that such a person/entity exists?

Isn't that EXACTLY the problem solved by cryptography, ie I can reliably know that only supplier X could have signed the message with the public key of supplier X ?

It depends on the security of supplier X's private keys. I think there's a general conflation of the security of the cryptography with the security of the system overall.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#266

Post by k_sh »

chrisco255 wrote: post #196
paulgb wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise we would see social networks and other free services replaced on the regular. Don't we? I can think of a dozen or more social networks of one sort or another that I've belonged to in the last decade or so.

And how many of those have the market cap of Facebook?

From 2007: "Will MySpace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?"[1]

Past performance does not beget future success.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#267

Post by atomicUpdate »

tacogordito wrote: post #93
this_user wrote: post #22

What does "blockchain" even mean in this generalised context? When we are talking about crypto currencies, it is a distributed database with a consensus mechanism that is extremely costly to run. But this is not something you would need or want in most other situations, because there is always some degree of trust with your counterparties (and legal recourse if necessary). If we strip away the consensus mechanism, al…

This is my question as well. Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency, yes. But where else in the real world is it even applicable?

> Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency

It's not perfect for that either. There have already been cases where tokens were stolen and blockchains were forked to recover them. The very last thing I want for my money is for errors and/or malicious acts to be permanent and uncorrectable.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#268

Post by hapnin »

spookthesunset wrote: post #263
hapnin wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first sentence of the Bitcoin white paper describes a problem that can't be solved by a normal DB. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

> "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." Except it failed completely at that. The blockchain has proven through real world use that it is unusable as a currency. By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions…

The initial problem was solved. It couldn't be solved using a mundane DB.

Scaling is a separate issue. I don't believe scaling is even mentioned in the original white paper.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#269

Post by kerkeslager »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #250
kerkeslager wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not hard to think of useful applications for blockchain. The problem HN has with blockchain is that a lot of HN users are the problem which decentralization solves. The basic startup monetization strategies these days revolve around centralizing user data and then collecting rent (usually in the form of ads) or centralizing transactions and then collecting a percentage. Decentralization is the antithesis…

But it is quite hard to think of a useful application for blockchain that isn't done better and cheaper by existing methods.

No, not really.

Anything where decentralized trust is useful: money, anonymous messaging, voting, etc.

Cheaper/better isn't really relevant, because these things can't be done by a centralized method without trusting a central authority, period.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#270

Post by kerkeslager »

spookthesunset wrote: post #263
hapnin wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first sentence of the Bitcoin white paper describes a problem that can't be solved by a normal DB. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

> "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." Except it failed completely at that. The blockchain has proven through real world use that it is unusable as a currency. By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions…

> By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions.

1. This is far from proven. Scaling is definitely a problem, but I don't think it's at all been proven to be impossible.

2. You still have to admit that bitcoin has solved this problem at a small scale, which isn't nothing. Transactions without a trusted central authority are literally impossible with previous technologies.

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